Although it’s tempting to title this article “Frozen in Time,” the Binnewater Ice Company is anything but. Now in its 115th year of operation, most of that time headquartered at 25 South Pine Street in Kingston, the business has continually modified its methods and products to meet the challenges of a changing market. While the ice the company sells is no longer locally harvested nor manufactured on-site, it is still reliably and affordably delivered to eight counties: Ulster, Dutchess, Columbia, Greene, Orange, Putnam, Delaware and Schoharie.
Gas stations, supermarkets and retail stores make up the primary customer base for ice, but bulk quantities can also be supplied for large events such as fairs and festivals. The company even has a sideline of creating artificial snow for movie sets, utilizing a machine called a crusher/slinger, which was originally acquired to make ice of “snowcone consistency” for cooling truckloads of corn en route to market from Rondout Valley farms, according to Binnewater Ice president Marshall Gogg.
Bottled water from Aqua Valley, a family-owned spring in the tiny town of Edmeston in Otsego County, has become a major component of the company’s offerings in recent decades. “For six months out of the year, ice is very busy, but water is year-round,” explains Gogg. “In dollar amounts, we still sell more ice than water.” They’ve also branched out into delivering rock salt, bundled firewood and coffee products.
The Binnewater Lake Ice Company was first incorporated in 1910 by Walter Crane and Edward Schultis, who cut surface ice from the Binnewater Lakes in the Town of Rosendale and delivered it to customers with their fleet of four ice wagons. By 1925 the company was doing well enough to purchase the Third and Fifth Binnewater Lakes outright, shipping the ice blocks from Rosendale to Kingston by rail. The Williams family, who founded a famed local hotel and resort on First Lake, which they renamed Williams Lake, bought Third and Fifth Lakes in 1929, but granted Crane and Shultis ongoing rights to harvest ice there until 1999.
As it turned out, the company only exercised that right for four more years. “Soon after that, the natural ice business was over. It became cheaper to produce your own,” says Gogg. By the mid-1930s, the Binnewater Lake Ice Company had brought mechanical icemaking to its storage facility on South Pine Street. But it wasn’t the only local business trying to cash in on the new technology, and competition was fierce. The original building was burned to the ground in August of 1938, probably due to arson. It was rebuilt, but one year later, two bombs were discovered on the premises.
Considering the wild times and the site’s location — just a block away from what is now Barmann Park, where Legs Diamond famously brewed illegal beer and piped it under city streets to a Midtown bottling and shipping plant — one might imagine that Binnewater’s owners somehow fell afoul of their mobster neighbor. But rival ice companies were always the prime suspects, according to Gogg, who says, “Of all the old stories I’ve heard of the early days of the company, there was nothing to do with Prohibition or bootlegging.”
Nowadays, in winter, the dark, chilly, cavernous spaces in the company warehouse on South Pine are stacked mainly with big wooden crates of five-gallon plastic jugs of spring water — the kind used in dispensers for homes and offices. It’s a low-tech, sustainable storage and shipping operation, relying on the insulating properties of double-thick concrete walls and foam panels, but you can see old refrigeration pipes crisscrossing the ceiling from the days when icemaking happened right here and ice was stored in bulk.
In one room sits the rusting hulk of a primitive refrigeration compressor, manufactured in 1829, which used ammonia to cool the storage rooms. The actual icemaking involved metal cans immersed in saltwater brine that would form 300-pound blocks “like giant popsicles,” Gogg says. Remnants can be seen in the building of ramps and cranes where enormous ice blocks were once slid away from the icemaking machinery, hoisted aloft and stacked all the way up to the 20-foot ceiling for storage.
The Binnewater employee who discovered the bombs, Robert Evory, eventually acquired the company and ran it during the 1950s and ‘60s, when cooling local produce for export became a major activity. Gogg says that he has childhood memories of Kingstonians complaining about the “long line of tractor/trailers down Washington Avenue” with loads of sweet corn just harvested in Hurley, Marbletown and Stone Ridge, awaiting their turn to be sprayed down and iced for the road.
Current owner Marshall Gogg is a scion of the Davenport family, who run one of Ulster County’s largest corn-growing operations. Today, most large corn farms have their own refrigeration equipment, but they used to have to outsource an awful lot of ice. So, Gordon and Robert Davenport decided to acquire the Binnewater Lake Ice Company in the 1970s. “It was cheaper for them to buy the building than to buy the ice,” Gogg recalls. “They never wanted to get in the ice business.”
Before long, delivery of bagged ice cubes to retail outlets had become a mainstay of Binnewater’s operation. By the late 1970s, the company had begun buying bagged ice from a larger, more modern icemaking facility, A.T. Reynolds & Sons of Kiamesha Lake, which proved to be more economical than making their own. In the early 1980s, A. T. Reynolds & Sons began supplying Leisure Time Spring Water, and Binnewater got on board as a water distributor.
The relationship continued after the Canadian company Arctic Glacier bought out A. T. Reynolds in 2004 and built a brand-new ice manufacturing facility in Newburgh, which remains the source of all Binnewater’s ice products. But when another Canadian company acquired the Leisure Time line in 2009, Binnewater launched its own brand of water and began phasing out Leisure Time. By 2012, the new product simply called Binnewater, sourced from the Aqua Valley company’s natural springs in Edmeston, had become the company’s flagship water product. For those who prefer mineral water, Mountain Valley is also available in glass bottles.
Adapting to changing technologies and markets has kept the Binnewater Ice Company viable for more than a century now, and part of Gogg’s job is watching consumer trends with an eye toward the future. Among those trends is “people’s wariness of municipal water sources and desire for controlling what goes into their body,” he says, which means that more and more people are opting for in-home delivery of ozone-disinfected, chlorine-free natural spring water. “There’s the unknown of what’s coming out of your tap, plus the convenience factor of bottled water coming right to your door. There has also been a shift to drinking water over sugar-filled products… They know what they’re getting when it comes from us. It’s great-tasting water, with not a high mineral content.”
Looking forward, Gogg is sensitive to the public’s growing awareness of the “disturbing” problem of global plastic pollution. Although one popular Binnewater sideline is providing custom-branded bottled water for special events like festivals, galas and 5K races, he says, “Our goal is to get as far away from single-serve plastic as we can. There’s a 400-to-500 fill-cycle life for our five-gallon plastic bottles, as opposed to bringing cases of small bottles home from a grocery store. It’s a very easy way to cut down on plastic use.”
Interested in water or ice delivery from Binnewater? The basic delivery size is five bottles, and you don’t have to commit yourself to any long-term contract. Says Gogg, “It’s all pay-as-you-go: the same price, no matter how many. Customer service is very important to us. We make it easy for people.” For more information, call (845) 331-0237 or visit the website at https://binnewater.com.
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